Watch Your Small Business Sales Soar With these 5 POS Tweaks

If you’re looking to increase small business sales, you don’t have to break the bank to make a meaningful impact on your bottom line. Sometimes it’s the little things that will make the biggest difference.

As a business owner you probably spend a few hours each week fending off sales calls for products designed to boost sales, bring in more customers, make you taller, and probably cure baldness. So, you’d be forgiven for believing the sales pitches and thinking that the only way to grow is to spend, spend, spend. But there are alternatives. Below I have outlined five free and easy tweaks to your iPad POS that you can implement right after reading this post. It should take about 5 or 10 minutes, seriously, it’s really easy. Enjoy.

Customizing your receipts with a Joke or Riddle

There’s no reason your receipt can’t be used as a tool to make your customers laugh and keep them coming back for more. Entertaining a customer and having a good experience in your store is a great way to increase their likelihood of becoming a repeat customer. One simple trick is adding extra text at the bottom of your receipts with a daily joke or riddle with a promotion incentive for answering correctly. You’d be surprise how small gestures such as this for small businesses can increase sales.

Integrate with MailChimp (Mail…Kimp?)

With the popularity of Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial (btw, I’m still not sure if Adnan did it or not), everyone should be well familiarized with MailChimp. Here’s why the adorable little monkey that allows you to send customized marketing campaigns to your valued customers. Using an iPad POS you can easily capture customers emails by emailing them a receipt and tracking their item purchase history. Using this information you can send that monkey out to let your customers know about incoming shipments of new products, events or upcoming promotions. Best of all, many iPad POS systems will integrate MailChimp directly into your POS software. With MailChimp being Free for the first 12,00 emails it’s an invaluable tool to keep in contact with your loyal customers and easily usable with an iPad POS.

Often I walk into a restaurant or coffee shop without a clue of what I want to get and will simply ask the server: “What’s good here?” OR “What’s new?” Not all employees, especially newer ones, will know off the top of their head what the top sellers or staff favorites are, but luckily your POS software can tell you that information. With a customizable layout on your iPad register, you can use your employees expertise and knowledge to list their favorite items, top selling items or even new arrivals to make recommendations to customers. Adding that consultative experience to your their visit can be an easy way to encourage them to come back next time and seek the advice of your employees. This is an easy way not only to engage your customers, but also give your employees a voice to let your customers know what the staff likes and what’s best at your shop.

Customize your iPad layout to drive upselling

A well structured register button layout is a great way to encourage your staff to upsell. Simply make sure you have items grouped together intelligently, so staff are subtly prompted to offer a muffin with every coffee, or a glass of house wine with every special. Equally item modifiers are great for this purpose. Make sure that each item has several ‘upgrade’ options that your staff can offer. On its simplest level this just means offering a shot of vanilla with that latte (for 55 cents extra). This won’t work if your staff don’t understand the art of sales, so I’d recommend checking out this guide written by our VP of Sales and Marketing here at ShopKeep on how to ‘convert’ each person who walks through your door into the most profitable sale possible.

Start Accepting Apple Pay & PayPal

With the advent of Apple Pay, businesses everywhere are looking for ways to incorporate mobile payments and allow their customers to pay in ways that convenient and allow us to leave the wallet at home Apple Pay is geared to be the biggest innovation in mobile payments in 2015, with Apple Pay bringing back mobile payments from the dead. Other great options that are already widely in circulation include PayPal. My colleague Richard Berger recently wrote a post on mobile payments you can check out for further information. With tech innovators coming up with brand new ways for consumers to leave the wallet at home, make sure you never have to turn away a customer who only has an iPhone to pay. Technically this does involve spending a little money to buy the relevant ‘reader’ hardware but new customers get a free Apple Pay reader when they sign up with ShopKeep – and current customers can lay their hands on a free one by referring a new customer!

They say it takes money to increase small business sales. Well, they’re wrong. You can start making more money tomorrow simply by implementing these small tweaks to your iPad POS.

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Henry Rossoff is a POS Specialist at ShopKeep, the #1-rated iPad point of sale system. Henry was born in New York and has tried to leave it as little as possible. He’s spent most of his career in technology and helping small businesses discover the joys of POS software.